The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [383]
‘“Don’t you let your son work on Grockleton’s line,” he said. “It’s not safe. They’re mad trying to go down there. They’ve only got to look at the geology.”
‘Well, I wasn’t in much of a mood to hear anything from Furzey, after what he did to us. So I said, “I don’t suppose you know more than the engineers of the London and South-Western Railway line.” After all, like him or not, Mr Grockleton was a magistrate and an important man. You couldn’t imagine him starting a big thing like that if he didn’t understand what he was doing.
‘“That’s Headon clay and gravel,” says Furzey. “The whole Forest is running off through it,” or words to that effect. I didn’t know what he was talking about, so I didn’t listen. And Gilbert went off to work there.
‘We found out soon enough what Furzey meant though. At first the digging of that line seemed easy. Going across from Brockenhurst through Sway, it’s all sand and gravel which is hardly difficult to shift. The first year or so they were very pleased with themselves. But things aren’t always what they seem, in the Forest.
‘You know on a beach, you can be sitting on the sand and it seems quite dry? But any child with a bucket and spade that digs down soon discovers that it’s all watery underneath and the wet sand’s runny and won’t stay still. It turned out the southern Forest was like that. There were tiny streams coming down by Sway – you could see them – but underneath there was a huge seepage, water just oozing down through the clay and the gravel. Every time they made a cutting and tried to build up the banks, everything just collapsed again. Several people were injured. The treacle mines, they called those workings, because the clay was a golden colour and as runny as treacle. The work was soon months behind schedule.
‘Only Grockleton didn’t seem to mind. “It’ll come right,” he’d tell them. “It’s the path to the future.”
‘I suppose the land of the Forest didn’t feel the same way.’ He shook his head ruefully. ‘But eventually it looked as if things were getting sorted out. The line by Arnewood and Sway, where the worst of the trouble had been, was duly laid. The banks of the cuttings looked solid.
‘And to celebrate, Mr Grockleton announced there was to be a picnic on the heath beside the line. I think he felt it would be good for morale, as they say.
‘He did that picnic in style. There was a brass band, tables of pies and cakes, more than you could eat. Beer and cider. It was like a fair, and a lovely, hot August afternoon he had for it too. All sorts of people were invited: the families of the men working on the line; people from Lymington and Sway, and even Christchurch. Colonel and Mrs Albion came along, the Furzeys too.
‘It must have looked a bit strange, in a way – two or three hundred people, with a brass band, sitting around by a half-finished railway line, under the hot sun, in the middle of a heath. There was an even stranger sight, though, to keep us company.
‘Have you ever noticed that when people make a lot of money they often get a bit strange? There was a man like that who’d retired to Sway. His passion was for concrete. He might’ve been a bit like Mr Grockleton I should think. Everything he could lay his hands on he wanted covered in concrete. And he was building this concrete tower. A huge thing – you can see it for miles around today. They say he wanted to be put up at the top of it when he died. It was about half-built then and I shall always remember it, pointing up into the blue sky not half a mile away from where we were that day, like a great broken pillar.
‘People were in a cheerful mood. Even Grockleton, who could be severe, was doing his best to be friendly. He organized games for the children; and when we had a race and Furzey organized a tug-of-war, he joined in too.
‘It was late afternoon and the Albions and some of the Christchurch people had already started leaving when I noticed little Jack had gone.
‘He was already a very daring little boy, with dark hair and bright eyes. Always climbing